Breaking and Entering

Is it just my building or does everyone's heater sound like someone is using a crow bar to break into their apartment? Every night this week, the loud pounding, grating and pathetic groans of the heating system would jolt me awake.
"Is it a burglar?!" I would wonder. "Is he single?"
And what's really ironic here is that I don't reside in a rent-stabilized, slum lord, tenement on the lower East side. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I live in a freaking Trump building. Donald needs to spend a little less time on his doomed clothing line and worry about our heating pipes.

I didn't get much sleep because of that. When the symphony of alarms I had orchestrated went off this morning, I seriously considered calling in sick. Then I realized today's assignment would pay for my plane ticket to Paris. So functioning on little sleep and my head swimming with missed wardrobe opportunities still in my closet instead of my suitcase, I made my way in to the company where I'm working this week. I love these guys but their clients are PR firms. I hate PR and I hate PR girls. They are all former "MRS" majors from college who live on the Upper East Side and work for peanuts because daddy subsidizes their income. They are sooo annoying. They manage to combine just enough ignorance and arrogance to make you want to crawl through the phone line on a conference call and knock their nose job back to high school. But this firm, the only one where I have ever whored myself out and actually enjoyed it, is different. They play the game but don't drink the company kool-aid. At least not my bosses who sarcastically yell, "Nice of you to finally fucking show up!" to each other one second and laugh about the client who had a meltdown over something as earth-shattering as the world's largest latte missing the mark the next. I do voice-over work here and this week actually recorded a fake breaking news segment for a corporate client. No, I didn't feel dirty because the "anchor" on last year's "crisis communication" version is currently a reporter at WABC and it will never air... I hope.

I digress, a lot. But you seem to enjoy the meanderings, me thinks. So moving slowly but deliberately towards work this morning, I ducked into a Starbuck's for a caffeine fix. The line coiled through the store. How is it that a city full of commitment-phobes is so loyal to a chain? So I decided to buck the system and go to a less prominent Starbuck's across the street. This one was much smaller, tucked between The Late Show studios and the theater showing The Color Purple. Damn. Another line, someone had leaked the clandestine location.

Coffee in hand, I finally show up at work only to have my friend Larry do a double-take when he sees me in my new Prada glasses. "Are you impressed or afraid?" I demanded.
"It's a little severe," he said without missing a beat, Larry doesn't give a shit if he hurts my feelings because, like many men I meet, he assumes I've always been treated like a princess and could use some "tough love."
"I was hoping for sexy librarian," I confessed. Oh well.

HPG says he's "addicted" to the blog and will soon be weighing in with comments. Can't wait. It's not enough that he rejected the love pariah by casting her aside like yesterday's sports page but now he has to try to one up me on my own blog. Cruel HPG.